Geneviève Makaping is a prominent African Italian writer whose book Reversing the Gaze, was first published in Italian in 2001. Her reflections about racism in Italy were among the first made by a Black woman. Now she is the subject of a documentary, Maka.
After having been selected at several European film festivals including the Brno Film Festival, the Swedish International Film Festival, and the Peloponnesus Documentary Film Festival among other festivals, the documentary Maka will premiere in North America on March 23 at 5 p.m. at the 10th edition of the Socially Relevant Film Festival in New York.
The screening will be held at the Jewish Community Center in Harlem 318 W 118th St. The film is directed by Moroccan Italian director Elia Moutamid and written by Simone Brioni – a scholar of migration literature and cinema who works at Stony Brook.
Mapaking’s groundbreaking book recounts her own experiences as she travels up through Africa and eventually settles in Italy. In her account she turns the tables on Italy’s white majority, scrutinizing them through the same unsparing gaze to which minorities have traditionally been subjected. As she candidly relates her experiences, Makaping describes acts of racist aggression that are wearing and degrading to encounter on a daily basis. She also offers her perspective on how various forms of inequality–whether they be based on race, color, gender, or class, feed off each other. Reversing the Gaze invites readers to confront the question of racism through the retelling of everyday occurrences that we all might have experienced as victims, perpetrators, or witnesses.
When Geneviève Makaping arrived in Italy in 1982, she was one of the few visible African presences in the country, let alone in Calabria, the region in which she settled for almost twenty years. Obtaining first an MA and then a Ph.D., she went on to have great success as a journalist at a local television station, and as the first Black director of an Italian newspaper, La Provincia Cosentina. She was also an important presence in Italian TV in the early 2000s: she was frequently a host in TV programs such as Buona Domenica and Il Maurizio Costanzo Show. More recently, she has relocated in Mantua where she teaches.
The book that inspired the documentary, What if the Other Were You, was recently published in English by Rutgers University Press (2023; translated by Giovanna Bellesia Contuzzi and Victoria Offredi Poletto).
Maka focuses on questions of national belonging, and it reflects on how the perception of migration and race has changed since Makaping first came to Italy in the 1980s. Questions of identity and belonging are also addressed in the documentary by the reflections of the director, a son of Moroccan parents, who grew up in Lombardy.
This new book and film reveal to the English-speaking audience the important work on the themes of racism and discrimination by a pioneer Black Italian intellectual and activist, and they allow us to look at the recent history of Italy from a new perspective.
